Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (12 page)

"I wanted desperately to play football in high school and I
never got the opportunity," he said. But twenty-five years later,
about forty miles up the road in Odessa at Permian, there was
some consolation.

It came in the form of Boobie.

Some who knew L.V. thought that he had pushed Boobie too
much, wasn't living for him as much as he was living through
him. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn't. From afar, it was
easy to criticize. But no one except the two of them truly knew
what they had been through together, how close Boobie had
cone to being devoured by the Texas Department of Human
Resources and the county welfare agency, to become simply
another nameless case number shuttled from one place to
another.

Boobie had been placed in a foster home when he was a
young boy still living in the Houston area. L.V. had visited him
and couldn't get his image out of his mind, that of 'a seven-yearold kid wearing size nine tennis shoes that turned up at the toes
they were so big, his hair mangy and unkempt, a wild child who
looked as if he had spent his life in the streets among thieves
and beggars and animals. L.V. could have turned his back on
him, could have let the image go. After all, Boobie wasn't his
child. But he couldn't do it. He just couldn't do it, and he became determined to get him out of there. "I didn't want to see
him go anywhere else, get away from the family, and never see
him again," said L.V.

He also knew that the longer Boobie stayed in a foster home,
the greater the odds were of his ultimately landing in a juvenile
detention center, or on the streets, or in prison. There was also
something about Boobie that excited him, a certain rawness
that if channeled the right way could make him into something
that no one ever expected.

There had always been something special about Boobie, even
in the way he was born, on April 16, 1970, en route to St. Luke's
Hospital in Houston with a police escort. Boobie lived with his
parents until he was three, when he went to live with his
grandmother.

He had a thick lisp when he was growing up and a craving
for honey buns, and his grandmother remembered how much
he loved to sing, belting out such songs as "Santa Claus Comes
to the Ghetto" with relish.

When he was about five, he went back to live with his father,
James senior. His father was working two jobs then, and Boobie
remembered spending a lot of time alone. Later his father
started seeing a woman whom Boobie did not get along with
at all.

He remembered an attempt to tie him to a dresser so he
could be beaten with an extension cord. He also remembered
getting beaten with an extension cord when he was taking a
bath. He went to school one day and officials there, believing
he had been victimized, would not let him return home.

Case number 32,101 was heard on October 20, 1977, in Fort
Bend County District Court in the Houston suburb of Richmond. Subsequent to that hearing, a court order on December
6, 1977, named the Fort Bend County Child Welfare Unit as
Boobie's temporary conservator over the protests of his father,
who said there had been no abuse but could not vouch for what
happened to his son while he was away at work. Boobie was
placed in a foster home, and his father was allowed to visit twice
a month. The order also noted that a study of the home of L.V.
Miles in Odessa would be arranged to see if it would be a suitable place for Boobie to live.

On August 22, 1978, a legal agreement was reached placing Boobie in L.V.'s care. Two days later Jamie Kolberg, a social
worker with the Department of Human Resources who had followed Boobie's case, wrote L.V. a note: "I hope you all had a
good trip home, and that James is getting settled in with your
family. I feel confident that his life has taken a turn for the
better, and that he has a good chance of being a happier child
in the future."

The day L.V. went to the Houston area to get Boobie, he had
a beard and was so massively built that he looked ominous. And
yet there was something gentle and tender about him, in the
way he had his arm around Boobie, who was wearing a red Tshirt and shorts with his shoulder tilting down slightly. They
both had thin smiles on their faces and they both looked painfully uncomfortable, as if they were embarking on a strange
and potentially explosive experiment for which there were no
predicted results.

Their initial time together had not been easy, and L.V. made
many trips to the elementary school, where Boobie would get
in trouble for fighting or talking back to teachers. He searched
for something, an experience they could learn and grow from
together, some way to channel all the anger that raged within
Boobie. He found it when he asked him if he wanted to play on
the Pop Warner football team that L.V. coached called the Vikings. From those underpinnings of football, an enormously
strong bond developed between the two. They had something
they shared.

"He's cool, I love 'im a lot," said Boobie of his uncle. "If it
weren't for him, I wou'n't be here. I'd be here but wou'n't be
as good because I wou'n't have nobody to push me like he
pushed me."

"Boobie, he's the most complete back that ever went to
[Permian]," said L.V. with pride. "He's the only running back I
ever saw who could take those two-hundred-pound linebackers
out, I mean take 'em out." When he said that, he had been
watching the video of the 1987 Plano-Permian state semifinal
game inside his living room.

The three-bedroom house was owned by L.V.'s wife, Ruby, and besides Boobie there were three other children living in it.
Ruby worked for a department store in the mall. L.V. was a
trucker, but with the oil bust, jobs had become increasingly difficult to find and he barely worked at all. Together, their combined income came to about $1,000 a month.

The house itself sat on a corner lot on Lincoln Avenue in the
Southside. The house seemed indistinguishable from others on
the Southside-some were smaller and shabbier, some had better paint jobs-except for the shiny yard sign that Boobie's Pepette had made heralding him as a member of the 1988 Permian
football team. The gleaming white sign looked misplaced and
almost silly in comparison to the ones over on the northeast side
of town, which were set out on the expansive lawns of homes as
serenely as rafts interspersed on a private sea.

"See that little spin there, we worked on that," said L.V. as he
watched Boobie dart free from the grasp of a Plano defender
and go for several of the 141 yards he gained that (lay. He
watched silently for a while, and then some aspect of Boobies
play struck him again.

"His blocking and stuff, we worked on that even in Pop
Warner.

"The Arlington game, that guy from the University of Texas
was very impressed with his blocking. He talked to me for a
long time."

A dozen other college recruiters were impressed as well, their
interest only increasing when Texas Football magazine, the Bible
of high school football, named Boobie a "blue chip" recruiting
prospect and one of the ten best running backs in the state.

Throughout the spring and summer and early fall recruiters
were in contact with Boobie by letter, urging him to give consideration to their schools. L.V. carefully kept the letters for him
in a large envelope, as if they were the family jewels. They came
from all over the country, from Notre Dame, Nebraska, the
University of Houston, Texas A & M, Clemson, Texas Tech,
Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, LSU, SMU, UCLA, and Arkansas.

Some of them were more personal than others. Some tried harder than others (Texas A & M led the way with twenty-three
pieces of correspondence, which included a hand-written postcard when it played in the Kickoff Classic at the Meadowlands).
Some sent glossy football programs; some, personalized mailgrams. But all of them gushed and fawned over Boobie, and it
was impossible not to be blinded by them. They bragged about
their facilities and their winning traditions and none of them,
of course, made any mention of the academic difficulties he
would face in college. All they knew about him was that he was
big and strong and fearless, and that was enough reason to
cram his head with dreams.

Boobie had been classified as a learning disabled student. Up
until he went to Permian, he had been placed mostly in selfcontained classes. When he went to Permian in the tenth grade,
he was mainstreamed into regular classes but could get extra
help when he needed it. His status made him exempt from the
state-mandated competency tests that were a requirement for a
high school diploma, and he had never taken college boards.

His schedule for the fall semester of his senior year at
Permian included algebra I, a course that many Permian students took as freshmen and some took in eighth grade; biology
I, a course that most Permian students took as sophomores;
and correlated language arts IV, a course for students at least
two years behind their grade level in reading and writing skills.

Boobie was on a schedule that would give him the required
course credits to graduate from Permian. But there was no way
he could fulfill the requirements of the NCAA for the number
of courses needed to qualify for a nonrestrictive scholarship.
Instead, Boobie was an automatic Proposition 48 case, meaning
he could be awarded a scholarship but would have to sit out his
freshman year, presumably to improve his academic skills. Because of the loss of a year's eligibility, most major colleges didn't
like Prop 48 cases and tried to avoid them, with rare exceptions.

L.V. was aware of Boobie's status, but lie didn't think it would
stop Boobie from getting a major-college scholarship if he was
healthy. When it came to the classroom, he said that Boobie was diligent, studying for tests when he had to and doing homework. But both he and Ruby sometimes wondered what Boobie's grades would be like if he weren't playing football, and they
also wondered how hard he was being pushed in the classroom.
"Boobie being an athlete, it's hard to tell," said Ruby.

Some teachers worked diligently and patiently with Boobie,
aware of how hard it was for him to concentrate. Others just
seemed to let him go, doing little more than babysitting this kid
who, as one acknowledged, was destined to become the next
Great Black Hope of the Permian football team.

On the football field, Boobie was frequently reassured and
coddled. He had been kicked off the team sophomore year for
missing workouts. But he had been allowed to rejoin after the
coaches concluded that the same demands made of other players could not be made of him if he was to stay on the team. It
wasn't a selfless decision, because they realized that Boobie had
the potential to be a franchise player for Permian.

They tried to induce him to do things in much the same way
a parent would coax a recalcitrant child to do something-hoping, for example, to get him to play a little defense by bringing
him a poster of Lawrence Taylor. "He's got a man's body, but
you're dealing with the mentality of a twelve-year-old child" was
the way Permian running back coach Mike Belew put it, remembering the time he had criticized Boobie for something
and he "laid down just like a mule."

The preferential treatment Boobie received sometimes caused
resentment among the other players. The coaches were aware
of the gripes, but the bottom line was that Boobie had the talent
and they did not. With his size and his speed and his ability, he
was worth the special status at whatever cost and whatever effect it had on the dynamics of the team or his own development. Like it or not he was the franchise, unless, for some
reason, they did not need him anymore.

Most who met Boobie agreed that he was one of those kids
for whom the game of football had become as important, as
indispensable, as a part of their bodies. Taking it away would
be like amputating a leg. Some in town, most of them black, worried about what might happen to him if it somehow didn't
work out, what the incredible effect of that absence might be.
They saw something potentially dangerous in it all. And some
in town, all of them white, gleefully suggested that Boobie
Miles, without the ability to carry a football in his hand, might
as well get a broom and start preparing for his other destiny in
life-learning how to sweep the corners of storerooms.

On other occasions, some whites offered another suggestion
for Boobie's life if he no longer had football: just do to him
what a trainer did to a horse that had pulled up lame at the
track, just take out a gun and shoot him to put him out of the
misery of a life that no longer had any value.

"What would Boobie be without football?" echoed a Permian
coach when asked the question one day. The answer was obvious, as clear as night and day, black and white in Odessa, Texas,
and he responded without the slightest hesitation.

"A big of dumb nigger."

III